Testing in Small Organizations

My interest in testing comes from my experience working with small organizations, mostly non-profits. In a university course I developed almost two years ago, my students and I help non-profit organizations manage Google AdWords grants, oftentimes leading to rather dramatic increases in their web traffic.

So, what happens to that traffic?

That’s where analysis and ultimately testing come into play. I’ve now developed a new course that we’ll debut in Fall, 2009 that I hope will drive at the heart of these issues for small organizations. In the course, students work hands on with small non-profit organizations to help them develop better landing pages for the successful AdWords campaigns other students developed in our first course.

A pilot we ran this last winter was critical in developing the new landing page course. In the pilot, I discovered that most people’s intuitions for what happens when visitors come to their web pages is just not very developed at all. The two students in that course thought that successful ad campaigns must necessarily result in higher conversions. Well, not if the page is designed so that visitors have to go through 5 screenfuls of information before they get to the item advertised.

Although that last sounds obvious, it’s just inapparent to most people until they get the conceptual scaffolding to read the kind of basic web statistics put out by packages like Google Analytics and relate them back to design decisions. So, I devote the first two thirds of the course to building that scaffolding. The last third of the course is devoted to testing the effectiveness of alternative, redesigned landing pages.

I’m excited to be publishing notes on Testing Thursdays because I think there is a lot of expertise in this community that I might be able to bring to bear in refining the course as we run through it a couple of times this coming academic year.